By GENE BERG

Don Wollett was a World War II veteran and longtime resident of Whidbey Island. Because I volunteer at the Whidbey Veterans Resource Center, a member of our church introduced us. I visited him weekly for several years to share our war stories for mutual pleasure.

Don grew up in Peoria, Ill. As a boy, he had a best friend who was Jewish. This friend told the story of Nazi officers coming to an uncle’s Berlin home in the night and taking him away, never to return. Moved by this story, Don joined the Navy, went to officer candidate training and studied celestial navigation at Northwestern University.  At age 23, he was the commander of a small ship during WWII, doing convoy escort duty in the Caribbean.

Of his Gulf of Mexico duty, he says, “The German subs just had their way with shipping.  They could pick us off at will almost. They sank over 450 vessels off the U.S. coast in one year. [ I checked.  It was 1942.] So we started traveling in convoys. Then all of a sudden the subs were gone. Almost none in the Gulf of Mexico. I don’t know what happened.”

I explained to him that their secure communications system, code named Enigma by the Allies, was broken and now the subs could be hunted and destroyed. The subs had to pull back closer to Germany because that was the German priority and so many subs had been sunk. This was amazing news to Don.

Don’s ship, SC511 (Subchaser 511), was made of wood. They were called the “splinter fleet.” The Subchaser was the smallest commissioned warship of the U.S. Navy during World Wars I and II. At times, the ship would list 42 degrees from side to side. They thought of it as home and were very fond of it.

It was armed with a 40 millimeter gun and eight Hedgehog projectiles. The Hedgehog was a mortar-like weapon with a range of about 250 yards, often launched in a 24 round pattern to arrive simultaneously and donate on impact. The advantage of the Hedgehog was that it did not interfere with sonar-like depth charges. The USS England sank six Japanese subs in a matter of days with the Hedgehog in May 1944.

“Once a sailor got some booze aboard and was drunk. He met me in the gangway and said, ‘I am gonna kill you, Wollett.’ I talked him into going to his bunk and sleeping it off.  Much later this same sailor called my mother and said he had changed his mind — Lieutenant Wollett was okay and he was not going to kill him.”

Made of wood, the Subchaser was less vulnerable to magnetic mines. But the real reason wood was used was that when the U.S. Navy was virtually destroyed at Pearl Harbor and the Philippines, all the large boatyards were busy building aircraft carriers and destroyers, so smaller and lower priority anti-submarine ships were built in small boatyards that were not already under contract.

“The Subchaser’s range was limited by drinkable water for the crew, limited to probably three or four days. Also, fuel limited us, but that was secondary.”

I asked, “You escorted convoys. Couldn’t you download fuel and water from them?” Don replied, “The convoys wanted to maintain speed and they did not want to be slowed down by us.”  With limited water, no one could shower. No one could wash clothes, either, so they called themselves the “Dirty Shirt Fleet.”

In the Gulf of Mexico, a convoy of 35 to 40 ships were typically escorted by five Subchasers. The leader of this assembly was the commodore. On one occasion the commodore announced a change in course. Don computed the new course and realized it would put the convoy at risk. He was confident in his navigation skills, so he suggested to the commodore that it might have been computed incorrectly and a different course be considered, a course that Don had computed.

The commodore inquired just who he was. The commodore explained carefully that he, the commodore, had responsibility for the full convoy and the Subchaser’s responsibility was just for the security of the convoy. But by the rules of operation, the commodore was expected to follow the Subchaser’s course. So the commodore agreed, and they did follow Don’s course. Don says, “For two days I was worried that I might be responsible for running this whole convoy aground. At the time I was a two-stripe lieutenant.”

Don Wollett died in September 2014 at age 95.

Berg is a veteran and volunteer writer with the Whidbey Veterans Resource Center.